Читать книгу The Wolf Woman - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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The next morning Caver awoke with such an unexpected sense of well-being that he nursed a not unnatural hunger to see his armistice-period, his interregnum of peace, slightly prolonged. He demanded an hour or two of pineland quietness before going back for Joan. He would go fishing. He deserved it.

It was not until he had told Rorie of his decision and was selecting his gear that he realized how values could change under the hand of Time. That same over-ample camp-outfit through which he was so impatiently rummaging for his fishing-tackle had seemed, two days before, a mockery and a deception, a hateful smoke-screen behind which he was escaping from his floundering pride. But the clock of misery couldn't always strike twelve. The morning was crystal clear; there was a smell of balsam in the air, and the pools between the silky river rapids shone sky-blue in the early sunlight. There was no reason, after all, why he couldn't snatch an hour or two of release from the darker enterprises of life.

"Take me where I can get fish," he commanded Aurora Mary.

But the girl, as she swung the canoe about and paddled into open water, remained singularly quiet and abstracted. Silence was a habit with her in her guide-work. So remote did she seem, in her oil-stained khaki and her battered old Stetson hat, that Caver twisted about in the canoe-bow and inspected her with a more studious glance.

It was then that he noticed for the first time the worn leather belt about her waist, from which depended on one side a huge hunting-knife with a polished horn handle and on the other side an equally ponderous six-shooter, protruding from an abraded cowhide holster that hung flat against her hip.

He smiled at that outfit, in spite of himself. It gave her a touch of wildness which did not go well with the momentary quietness of her eyes.

"Why all the hardware?" he curtly inquired.

"I usually wear 'em when I'm bushwhackin'," she answered, without pausing in her paddling.

"For ornament?" he demanded.

"F'r use," she quietly retorted.

"You didn't honor me with them yesterday," he reminded her.

"The provincial police ain't exactly crazy about gun-totin' down in a settlement like Duck Landin'," she casually explained.

"But up here, you can do as you like?"

"Up here I carry this gun when I damn' please," she averred, swinging forward with a stronger stroke.

"Any notches in your gun-handle?" he asked with his faintly ironic smile.

"Not yet," she retorted. "But I'm still purty young."

He laughed at that, in his morning lightness of mood, and noticed the firm brown line of her neck where it merged into the muscular square shoulder.

"Honest, now," he exacted, "could you hit the side of a barn?"

She did not answer him and he was on the point of concluding that she intended to let his taunt go disregarded, when she rested her wet paddle-blade across the canoe-thwart.

"Y' see them three, yellow, water-lily buds over there in the shallows, side by side under them bulrushes?" she asked.

"Yes, I see them," he acknowledged. They were three or four times farther than he could cast with a trout-fly.

Before he quite knew what she intended doing, she swung her right hand across her left hip and then revolved it in an airy S-shaped double circle. Three reports rang out on the quiet morning air; and Caver, catching at the canoe-side, saw the girl thrusting the blue-metaled revolver-barrel down in its holster again.

"See 'em now?" she quietly inquired.

He looked, slightly incredulous; but the three tiny bulbs of yellow were gone. Then he laughed, thinly but appreciatively.

"I fancy we'd better treat you with a trifle more respect," he said as Rorie took up her paddle again.

It was her trivial little frontier efficiencies, he assumed, that gave the girl her quiet and slumbering sense of fortitude, a fortitude not unlike that of wild-life creatures armed with fang and claw. But such things would be useless, and more than useless, in that tamed and crowded world which he had so recently left behind him. Battles there, he remembered, were fought with more complicated weapons. And Caver remained thoughtful as, in the prolific waters to which she piloted him, he experienced the electric thrill of repeated strike after strike, fought his miniature Waterloos, and landed or lost his fish.

Yet the strikes, he began to see, were coming too continuously. The sport thinned and lost its zest. He even failed to react to the tug of a three-pound black bass on his rod. And that, he told himself as he realized his hour had been squeezed dry, was like the younger generation that stood personified in his daughter Joan. Their reach exceeded their grasp. They got things too easily, and tired of them too quickly, and over-promptly craved new hazards and went off in search of new sensations. They considered themselves untrammeled and audacious, but they generally proved themselves to be, in actuality, a page or two late in learning the real lesson of life.

"I want you to be good to that girl of mine," he said out of a clear sky.

The young woman in the khaki hunting-suit looked up at him, perplexed by some new note of humility in his voice.

"Folks git what they fish for, as a rule," was her none too promising reply.

"Couldn't you make it a little more generous than that?" he asked, resenting his own abashment before a figure so rough. "You see, she hasn't been as lucky as you have."

"What've I got that she hasn't?" demanded the daughter of the wilderness. He could see the morosely dark eyes studying his face.

"You've got strength," he found himself saying, "and a superb young body, and the ability to take care of yourself. And life is just opening up for you, in a way, while Joan has pretty well swung through the whole circle."

Flattering as it sounded, it made little impression on her.

"I've mushed over a trail or two she mightn't know about," announced the girl with the paddle.

"I know," he acknowledged. "And it makes me feel that if the two of you could trade places for a while, it might be considerably better for both."

He waited for her reaction to that. Whatever it happened to be, however, she kept it to herself. And since petitioning was new to him, his disappointment flowered into sudden acerbity.

"Let's land and have lunch," he commanded. For she was, after all, merely the chore-girl of a bush-camp.

"Where?" she sullenly inquired.

"There, on that flat rock," he ordered, with a hand-wave toward the quiet-shadowed shore-line.

She frowned, as though in doubt as to the propriety of that particular landing-point, but proceeded to paddle dutifully shoreward.

"We're over deep water here," she cautioned him as he reached a hand out to the rounded lip of the rock-shelf.

That warning, apparently, touched him into a new impatience, for he rose abruptly and proceeded to step resentfully ashore. But the canoe, dipping under the unexpected weight on its side, veered off and slid from under him. The rounded rock-shoulder gave him nothing to cling to. He went floundering down into the amber-green depths, his world obliterated in a sudden singing rush of water. His head, as he struggled upward, struck the canoe-bottom, and he went down for the second time. He seemed destined to remain there, denied the fundamental right of breathing, for a calamitously long time. He was concluding, in fact, that the privilege of filling his lungs with God's cool air would never again be his, when he felt himself in the clutch of strong young fingers and a strong young arm holding him up.

"It's all right," cried Rorie, swimming easily as she towed him about the rock-shoulder into shallow water and as coolly helped him ashore.

He sat on the warm rock, coughing and spitting, as the girl reentered the water and retrieved the drifting canoe. Having pulled it up on the shore-gravel, she looked about for her discarded hat and belt, picked them up, and pushed the wet black hair back from her brown forehead. Her figure, under its sodden khaki, looked singularly statuesque. But what most impressed Caver, as he sat grateful for the sun that warmed his dripping body, was the casualness with which she was accepting it all.

"I suppose you know you saved my life," he said, frowning over the shake in his hands as he bent to unlace his shoes.

She merely laughed at that.

"You'd have scrambled out, all right," she said as she took off her soggy moccasins. "About all I did was to save time."

But he showed no sympathy for that stand.

"I couldn't have made it," he proclaimed, blinking down at the rough woolen socks, much-darned and obviously made for male wear, which covered her feet. Deliberately and solemnly, he noticed, she was pulling them off and wringing them out. "I was—was getting groggy."

She stood silent a moment as she buckled on her belt and its pendent weapons.

"You weren't ten feet from shore," she reminded him as she pulled the battered old felt hat down on her wet forehead.

"You most assuredly saved my life," he persisted. "And when the occasion arises," he added with deliberated solemnity, "I intend to see that you do not lose by it."

But that proclamation produced no promise of the desired effect.

"I guess we'd better git back to camp," she merely suggested. She moved toward him, as though to help him to his feet, but he waved her testily aside.

"You seem to set a pretty low figure on me and my future," he said as he scrambled up.

"How d'you mean?" she demanded, preceding him to the canoe.

"Saving a life like mine doesn't seem to loom very large on your horizon."

"But I didn't save it," she protested. "An' if I'd landed right, you wouldn't even have got wet."

"Well, I insist on proclaiming that you did," said Caver as he climbed into the canoe. "And that's something you're going to hear about later."

It seemed neither to interest nor elate her. She remained silent as she took up the paddle and headed for home. The habitual small frown hovered between her brows as they followed the course of the winding waterway, the damp khaki on her body steaming a little in the noonday sun. That frown even deepened as she rounded the Point and swung into the home waters of Trail-End Camp, for entering the same waters, from the opposite direction, she caught side of a Peterboro canoe laden down with two wardrobe trunks and a litter of hand-bags. The canoe, she saw, was paddled by two 'breeds from Duck Landing, and between them sat a thin-faced young woman in a vivid orange-colored traveling-coat of camel's hair and an aggressively tilted pastel cloche. Her attitude was that of a voyageur tired and bored and slightly indignant. And the glance which she directed toward the second canoe was in no wise a conciliatory one.

When Caver, a moment later, caught sight of the second craft, an exclamation of surprise touched with impatience broke from his lips.

"How'd you get here?" he demanded as the drifting canoe came closer. The girl under the tip-tilted cloche took her own time in replying to that question.

"I roosted in that slab-sided wooden hotel until I simply couldn't stand it any longer," she announced as she inspected his fishing-tackle with a deliberately hostile eye.

"I told you to wait for me."

"Well, I did wait, until I got sick of it. So while you were amusing yourself in the great open spaces I hired these stalwart heroes and repacked my hope-chest and came up on my own hook. And I trust it isn't in any way interfering with your morning's outing!"

He resented the derisive note in her voice, but he compelled himself to ignore it. He was acutely conscious of the still hostile stare with which that rebellious daughter of his was inspecting the khaki-clad figure in the birch-bark canoe. And he wished, as an accumulating sense of climax took possession of him, that the meeting between those strangely diverse young women could have been more propitious. He saw Rorie's discerning dark eyes bent on the vivid-colored figure confronting her. Yet in those dark eyes, oddly enough, he detected no trace of antagonism. It was more a childlike and silent curiosity touched with bewilderment.

"Who is this?" was Joan's curt inquiry. And Caver winced under the inescapable cool impersonality of that query.

"That," he said with unexpected heat, "is the young woman who has just saved my life."

"From what?" asked the emotionless girl from the city.

"From a watery grave," averred Caver, coloring a little at the consciousness of an unnecessarily theatrical tinge to his words. "And what's more, she's the person you'll have to depend on to make you comfortable while you are up here at Trail-End Camp."

His daughter's laugh impressed him as both unseemly and untimely.

"In your case," suggested the cool-eyed Joan, as she inspected his water-soaked figure, "she doesn't seem to have been eminently successful."

"Then let's hope," retorted Caver, "that yours terminates more happily."

He was sorry for that, the moment he had said it, for he could see the quick hardening of the hostile young mouth. And she already seemed depressingly remote from him, from the love and the help he should be proffering her.

"I'll at least insist on the privilege of paddling my own canoe," his daughter was saying to him. And that second wave of opposition brought a second tingle of indignation through his body.

"You seem to have had it," was his embittered reply.

Instead of answering that, at once, she turned to her stern-man and motioned for him to push on to the boat-landing. The canoe once more got under way. Aurora Mary kept beside the newcomers, stroke by meditative stroke, as they moved forward. Yet she was watching the other young woman intently, every moment of the time. She noticed the preoccupied set face as it studied the cluster of white cabins and the clean-floored hollow between the hills and the orderly piles of stove-wood, even the row of sweet-peas under the main lodge window-sills. But it wasn't until Pancake, scenting their approach, howled forlornly from the shore-crib, that the city girl spoke again.

"Is that a wolf?" she demanded of no one in particular.

"That's my dog," answered Aurora Mary in her quiet full-throated contralto.

"And who's the woodland sylph?" inquired Joan as she directed her gaze toward an incredibly fat and slow-moving old Indian woman engaged in hanging a multi-colored washing along a sagging clothes-line.

"That's Kippewa Kate," was the same cool-noted reply.

"And who's Kippewa Kate?"

"The squaw who'll look after you when you're in camp here," explained the unexpectedly patient Aurora Mary.

"Oh, my own private and personal femme de chambre!" exclaimed the young woman with the insurrectionary eyes. But in those eyes the other woman detected both weariness and frustration. And for one of the few times in her life, she determined to keep her temper under control. It was, indeed, Joan's father who was finding it hard to hold himself down.

"Money," he sharply reminded her, "won't buy you very much up in this territory."

She shrugged and grimaced, to show that she understood, but the lines once more hardened about her young mouth.

"I don't think it ever has bought me much, in any territory!" she exclaimed. Her face remained clouded as she climbed wearily up on the boat-landing. There her restless eye wandered back to the dusky-skinned girl in the birch-bark. She seemed to be appraising her as one appraises a fellow-traveler in unexpectedly cramped quarters.

"So you're to be my jailer?" she ruminated aloud.

"Not by a damned sight," was Aurora Mary's blunt but in no way antagonistic answer.

"How modern we are!" murmured the smaller-bodied young woman. "Cussing like a Park Avenue trooper!"

Aurora Mary flushed, but remained silent.

"Let's get this duffel ashore!" exclaimed Caver, anxious to end an encounter that bore faint promise of being auspicious.

Yet later in the afternoon, when he wandered over to the chintz-hung cabin that was to house Joan, he found the two women in an unexpected armistice of quiet activity, unpacking the bags and trunks that covered the well-scrubbed pine flooring. A new light smoldered in Aurora Mary's eyes as she took up flimsy cobwebs of lace and silk and adjusted them to their hangers. A new intentness of manner took possession of her as she carried toilet articles of ivory and gold to the plain deal dressing-table with the distorting mirror in its frame of lacquered pine-cones.

"This junk," announced Joan with an abstracted stare at the glimmer of metal and shimmer of silk, "certainly looks out of place in the pinelands. But it's what you might call half a trunkful of camouflage. Servants seem so hopelessly nosey."

Aurora Mary, apparently, was not listening to her. She seemed more interested, at the moment, in the dissimulative finery that was being unearthed before her eyes. For Caver, as he studied her from the doorway, could see the look of hunger that crept into the Indian-brown face as Joan held a foolishly ornate dinner-frock up to the light. It was a tissue of flowing green stippled with silver, and a spangle of rhinestones along its paneled front made it singularly like a mountain waterfall played on by autumnal sunlight. His daughter's gesture, as she shook out the flimsy overdrape, was one of careless disdain. But the woman in the Cree moccasins found her breast heaving in a sigh that was almost audible across the room.

Joan turned to her, her smile remotely commiserative.

"Do you like it?" she asked.

Aurora Mary gasped, breathing deep. "It's—it's a dream!"

"Then take it," said Joan, tossing the iridescent folds across a trunk-end. "I'm sick of the thing."

Caver remembered, at the moment, how it was hunger that eventually tamed the creatures of the wild. It was through their desires that the intractable were controlled. And that hunger need not be always for food. It could be for fripperies and fineries, for freedom and wider fields, for beauty, for love itself. Yet it tamed them in the end, tamed them where opposition and conflict would have left them still fighting and feral.

But Aurora Mary, Caver noticed, was not quick to reach out a hand to the cascading green drapery. She had not even moved toward that proffered dream.

"Don't you want it?" was Joan's sharp inquiry.

"No."

"But you said you liked it."

"What's that got to do with it?" demanded the other, a new grimness about her mouth.

"Don't you take what you want?"

"Not until I've earned it," was the unnecessarily gruff-noted reply.

Joan turned and studied her for a moment. Then she laughed, lightly and defensively.

"How unsullied we are!" she said as she brushed the gown aside and bent over the open trunk again.

Aurora Mary was not unconscious of the mockery in those muttered words, but for reasons all her own the bush-rat's daughter seemed determined to avoid any surrender to anger.

It was Joan's father who none too adroitly stepped into the breach.

"I see you two girls are going to hit it off all right," he proclaimed as he advanced into the room.

"What makes you think that?" questioned Joan, bent over her trunk-tray.

"Because you have so much in common."

"Have we?" queried his daughter as she handed the woman in khaki a photograph in an easel-frame of chased gold. It was the photograph of a man of about thirty, a tanned and sinewed man with honest and humorless eyes and an unexpected promise of laughter about a rather grim mouth. It was an arresting face, the sort of face one looked at for the second time. And Aurora Mary, with her frontier directness, stared at is so openly that a faint current of disquiet flowed through Caver's body.

"Who's that?" she asked with a nod toward the easel-frame she was finally placing on the dressing-table.

Joan turned and looked back at the photograph.

"That's my man!" she proclaimed. She said it quietly, and yet she said it challengingly. Caver, as he met his daughter's eye, frowned and remained silent. If some flash of understanding eddied along their insulated wires of silence, Aurora Mary remained unconscious of it, for she stood with frontier directness staring back at the face in the gold frame.

"Is that your husband?" she bluntly inquired.

Again the wires of silence carried their flash of understanding.

"No," was the unexpectedly grim-noted reply, "but he's going to be!"